What OSCE is and how it works

What was signed at Helsinki

The Final Act of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe was signed at Helsinki on 1 August 1975 by 35 states, which was every European state except Albania together with Canada and the United States. It is not a treaty. It was put to no ratification anywhere, and its closing lines ask the government of Finland to transmit the text to the Secretary-General of the United Nations with the statement that it is not eligible for registration under Article 102 of the Charter. Article 102 registration is what a treaty gets. The Final Act was drafted to be denied it.

What the text carries instead is a declaration of ten principles guiding relations between the signatories, and three groups of undertakings the negotiators called baskets: security in Europe, co-operation in economics, science and the environment, and co-operation in humanitarian and other fields. The third basket is the reason a security conference ended up running an election observation office.

A decision is the absence of an objection

Consensus here is defined as the absence of any objection expressed by a participating State to the adoption of the decision in question, and a text adopted that way is politically binding on all of them or records their agreed view. There is no vote and no weighting. A delegation that says nothing has agreed; a delegation that speaks has stopped the decision. Where a text is circulated under the silence procedure it passes unless somebody objects before the deadline, and even the use of that procedure has to be agreed by everyone first.

Two exceptions exist on paper. Consensus minus one allows a decision to be taken over the objection of a State in clear, gross and uncorrected violation of its commitments, and it has been used once, in July 1992, to suspend Yugoslavia. Consensus minus two allows the Ministerial Council to send two States in dispute to conciliation whether they agree to go or not, and it has never been used. The Parliamentary Assembly, whose international secretariat sits in Copenhagen, is outside the rule altogether and decides by majority of its membership.

How a body named for Europe reached Central Asia

Nobody voted to extend the map. The Soviet Union signed at Helsinki as one signatory, and when it dissolved its successors were admitted in batches: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania at a ministerial meeting in Moscow on 10 September 1991, then ten more at the Council of Ministers in Prague on 30 and 31 January 1992, among them Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. Croatia, Georgia and Slovenia followed at Helsinki on 24 March 1992. The five Central Asian members are there because the state that signed for them in 1975 stopped existing, not because anyone reconsidered what Europe meant.

The later admissions are individual. Andorra, which had signed nothing in 1975, was admitted on 25 April 1996. Montenegro was admitted on 22 June 2006, weeks after its independence. Mongolia was admitted on 21 November 2012, the same calendar date on which the Charter of Paris had been signed twenty-two years earlier.

One member of this hub is filed under a name the organisation does not use. The participating State is the Holy See, which signed at Helsinki in 1975, and the catalogue files the territory as Vatican City. It is not a member of the United Nations.

Paris, then a change of name

The Charter of Paris for a New Europe, signed on 21 November 1990, turned a recurring conference into something with an address: a secretariat, a conflict prevention centre, and an Office for Free Elections that became the Office for Democratic Institutions and Human Rights at the Prague meeting of January 1992. The Secretariat and the Representative on Freedom of the Media, a post created in December 1997, sit in Vienna. ODIHR sits in Warsaw, and the High Commissioner on National Minorities, created in 1992, sits in The Hague.

The name arrived last. The Budapest summit document of 6 December 1994 renamed the CSCE the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe with effect from 1 January 1995, and said in the same breath that the change altered neither the character of the commitments nor the status of the institutions. A conference with permanent staff had been called a conference for four years, and calling it an organisation changed nothing about what it could compel.

The two documents the work runs on

The Copenhagen document of 29 June 1990 committed the signatories to invite observers from other participating States to their national elections, on the stated reasoning that the presence of observers can improve the process. That paragraph is the whole basis of an ODIHR observation mission. There is no election monitoring treaty underneath it.

The Vienna Document is the military half: an annual exchange of information on forces and defence planning, notification of exercises above agreed thresholds, and inspections and evaluation visits on the ground. It has been rewritten four times since its first version of 1990, the last of them the Vienna Document 2011, adopted on 30 November 2011.

Where the rule has stopped the work

Consensus is also what happens when there is none. The Special Monitoring Mission to Ukraine began work on 21 March 2014 and discontinued operations on 31 March 2022, its mandate having not been renewed. The unified budget has not been adopted since 2021, and the organisation has run on monthly allotments measured against the 2021 figures. The chair rotates by calendar year and is designated by the Ministerial Council, which is a decision like any other and needs the same unanimity: the chair for 2024 went to Malta, agreed at the Skopje meeting of 30 November and 1 December 2023.

What membership is not

It is not a defence commitment. Nothing here obliges a participating State to come to another's aid, and the roster runs across the alliances rather than along them. Nor is the roster the edge of the map the organisation works on: the Partners for Co-operation, grouped as Mediterranean and Asian, take part in meetings without being participating States. Kosovo is not a participating State, and the OSCE Mission there has been running since 1 July 1999.

The word the organisation uses for a member is participating State, and it is not a courtesy. There is no accession treaty to ratify, no instrument to deposit, and no obligation a court can read. There is a letter accepting the commitments, a seat at the table in Vienna, and the standing ability to stop anything by saying so.